So, where did this begin? I’d been seeing a few news articles about ‘the internet of things’ dotted around the place and there was something that just seemed to chime with me. I started thinking about all the things you could do with devices that could communicate with each other.

One of the news articles must have sent me looking in the direction of Arduino. I started reading their site, and started searching for blogs and sites for more details. Eventually, I thought what the hell, lets just buy one.I decided not to just get a simple Arduino Uno board, but opted for the Sparkfun Inventors kit.

The kit comes with a load of components to get you started, and some pretty decent instructions. Within a few minutes, I had everything hooked up and working perfectly. Of all the components included in the kit, it was the temperature sensor and light sensor that were of major interest to me.
I wasn’t too fussed about the motors and servos, although they provided the necessary amusement to the family, where they could see some kind of tangible result of my tinkering.

So that was pretty much it, I could hook the Arduino up to my computer, and get it to measure the temperature and light level. But as yet, I couldn’t do much of any interest with that data.